Western movies come with certain promises: of adventure and lawlessness, of chiseled jaws and gun smoke, of riding into the sunset with the horizon for…
Helena Girón and Samuel Delgado’s The Fortunate Isles begins with images of gently undulating water accompanied by a brief text providing historical context for their…
Carol Nguyen is a Canadian-Vietnamese filmmaker who has steadily climbed the ladder of the national industry since her prolific run of breakout short projects, in…
In this dispatch: Wild Horse Nine, Ha-Chan…
Two depressed guys, a remote location, and loads of shit hitting the fan. Martin McDonagh doesn’t need much more to make sophisticated black comedies that…
Love buds during summer on an idyllic Korean island. At least, it does for Jin (Sim Su-bin), a 17-year-old girl native to the island. Her…
As a certain theory of Baudrillardian post-intellectualism would have it, we now live in what could be referred to as an “anti” age — an…
Hong Kong cinema is dying, or at least so says the BBC (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQd3BiwYM1E). But keen observers will note that Hong Kong cinema, like cinema itself,…
The power wielded by Thierry Frémaux and the Cannes Film Festival is such that countries can become defined, for a decade or even longer, by…
In this dispatch: Trash Mountain, Idda…
The 2026 Toronto International Film Festival seems intent on making lightning strike twice. Last year, Obsession went from a Midnight Madness premiere to one of…
Volcano as woman, women as volcanoes. This simile describes the driving force behind Idda, Italian director Irene Dionisio’s deeply affecting memory film about a symbiotic…
The new film from Australian horror director Nick Kozakis, Kick On is the sort of movie designed to play TIFF’s Midnight Madness and excite a…
In August 1974, during a speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Korea’s liberation at the end of World War II, the first lady of Korea,…
Toronto-based filmmaker Yuula Benivolski has made several impressive short films, the most recent of which, why I never became a driver, played several experimental film…
In this dispatch: Josephine, The Violinist…
There is a striking early scene with an unknown woman that cuts deep into the sensory motif embedded in the title of May el-Toukhy’s latest…
War is hard to steer away from in the 2026 Venice Film Festival program, where films from Iran (A Bit of Light), Palestine (Citizen Osama),…
In 2025, among the best films of the year, at least according to this very outlet, was Lav Diaz’s Magellan. That work concluded along the…
The way in which we tell the origin story of a romantic relationship says a lot about how we look at our partners in the…
We, in the modern world, are more connected to one another than ever before, and increasingly so. But are we also lonelier than ever? In…